I'm in the need of a tool to help debugging a web application. Is there some simple
client tools that allow you to easily send and construct customizable
POST
[1]/
GET
[2]/
PUT
[3]/
DELETE
[4] HTTP requests?

Perhaps obvious, but note that if you use this you should never put cookie values into an online tool. Doing so is equivalent to giving them your password until you log out. If I were hurl.it, I'd sit around waiting for somebody to put in Paypal and a cookie. - mlissner

After our a recent redesign, Hurl.it no longer retains any data on the server. We definitely don't want to hold on to people's sensitive data. - Runscope API Tools

much easier than reading through the curl manual... sheesh - indienchild

2

[+88]
[2009-07-06 14:16:17]
Christopher_G_Lewis
[ACCEPTED]

For Windows,
WFetch
[1] is your quick and dirty answer.
Direct download link can be found
here
[2].

I use Chrome now so I use RESTConsole or Advanced REST client. Both are good. - Damo

I found www.hurl.it from an answer posted bellow, that is also good. (platform independent, browser independent and nice user interface) - Adil Malik

4

[+34]
[2011-07-07 19:25:38]
kontinuity

I absolutely love http://apikitchen.com it is one versatile tool that I have seen for HTTP debugging. They are offering a Mac client for testing within internal networks else you can use their hosted solution with permalinks to share the API output with other developers.

(1)
I have been using Advanced REST client for a while now and enjoy it! PS, I am adding this as a comment as I can't add it as an answer. - whirlwin

Postman plugin was exactly what I needed: easy to install and handles smoothly requests to local web app (which hurl for example doesn't unless your machine has a public IP address or domain name) - Taoufik Mohdit

The grandaddy of them all is
Telnet
[1]. Just open a connection on port 80 and type in the raw commands. Most of the basic Internet protocols, such as HTTP and mail, are text-based and this is part of the reason why.

Of course, if you prefer something more abstract, there are also command-line utilities like
Wget
[2] and
cURL
[3].

Wget
[1] is very versatile. TIP: use wget -d to get full debugging information about the request and response.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wget

12

[+4]
[2010-03-01 10:39:07]
Arjan

For non-automated testing, the
Live HTTP Headers
[1] add-on for Firefox can be used to alter and replay requests. (It can also change the request method; though the request method dropdown only shows GET and POST, one can actually type whatever one likes, even invalid methods. One could also type the whole request payload, but I assume the other answers offer better solutions for that.)

(The
Web Developer Toolbar
[4] can easily change the method attribute in a <form> itself, which after submitting once might make it easy to change request parameters, in some limited cases. One can achieve the same with any tool like Firebug or Web Inspector.)